Thursday, June 5, 2014

this must be the place

On the Sunday before Scott was born, we witnessed the wedding of two sweet kids (jk!) at our church, and attended their lovely reception, both of which of course gave us opportunity to reflect on our own marriage (see how selfish people are? I'm not sure it's a bad thing, though.)

We hadn't been to any weddings since our own, three and a half years ago. If you look at the pictures taken right after the ceremony, you'll see us looking extremely stoned and confused, hardly smiling at all. That's because we were floating in a haze of incomprehension and joy (the sober, unsmiling kind.) I told my husband that I was glad to attend another Orthodox wedding so that I could finally listen to the words (and was it just my parturient brain, or are all the prayers about having babies??) When we were getting out of the car at the reception one of our friends said "Hey, we found the program from your wedding in our service booklet." We said "We had a program?" That's how little attention we were paying to the details. It was a slapdash sort of affair, just a church service with gyros and an iPod afterward. I wonder if people thought it was a shotgun wedding. Nope, we was just anxious to get hitched before Lent.

At the reception as we were dancing, we realized that among the many other nuptial conventions that we did not observe, we did not have a "first dance" as a couple, nor did either of us dance with our parents. I guess we would have felt silly, but I don't know why because I like it when other people do it. That started us wondering what song we might have chosen for a first dance. The problem, we decided, is that most of our favorite touching songs range from wistful and bittersweet to downright tragic, and people definitely listen to the words in these situations.

This is the most appropriate song that I can come up with. And we did dance to it at our wedding, but with all of my drunk or eleven year old siblings and father, and Matt's sister, and my best friend from college, at the very end of the wedding when everyone else was cleaning up, and we just played all the Talking Heads songs that we had in iTunes. It was awesome.